Farmer's Market Week 21 (Pane Maggiore)

Well it's technically over. My experiment has concluded. Yesterday was the last of the farmer's markets and I made it to 21 of 26 of the markets with bread to trade. I've made some friends and had a really good time trading food for food. In honor I offered my loaves as gifts yesterday in appreciation of the farmers who were happy and willing to trade with me. This didn't go so well as they still pushed food at me. But i tried. Furthermore they have added a winter market to start next week so I guess it never ends. Yay. But I'll feel better about missing some now that the summer has ended and trading bread in the rain will be trickier.

I decided to revisit Pane Maggiore from week 6 as it was one of my households favorites of the season. I stuck to the true recipe the first time around but didn't leave myself and notes. Now I have notes to add. Only 7.9% of the flour is prefermented and for 18 hours which certainly adds a lot of flavor to this loaf. About .3% yeast is added to the dough and I assume its to make up for the small amount of starter and I followed suit. The original also calls for retarding the shaped loaves and baking them cold, which is perfect for my setup. I shaped them at 8pm and retarded immediately. Woke up for some water a few hours before I intended to get started (3 am) I took a peek and they were blowing up in the fridge. Fortunately the oven was preheated and ready to go. So I got to it at once. They were on the cusp of overproofing but I think they just got to a cold enough state where the activity had nearly ceased. In hind site I think something similar happened last time as well. Should have taken notes. I blame the freshly milled flour and the quantity of yeast. If I do this loaf again I will cut the pinch of yeast down to a 1/3 at .1% and see if that mellows it out.

It truly is a marvelous loaf. Moist open crumb with tons of flavor from the long wheat perferment and the most amazing crunchy crisp crust with the awesome chew that I attribute to the rye. At 86% hydration this is a tricky dough to handle but well worth the work behind it.

I also made extra loaves to bring over to a new friends house to bake in his WFO. It's a domed oven more suitable for pizza but he's a mason and we will tinker with temps, timing, and steaming until we get some really nice loaves. The loaves baked in my home oven took about 35 minutes to bake. In the WFO (which was too hot I suppose) took 17 minutes to bake.